Chrome Sign Builder vs. Zoom Rooms

If you are looking for an inexpensive, set-and-forget digital signage solution and your content isn't customized often, Chome Sign Builder is a win. It is easy to set up, includes multiple identity providers, and its Kiosk mode makes displaying the content a breeze on many different supported devices. It also doesn't require much maintenance, so if your team is small, it's a perfect fit.

Incentivized

User friendly, reliable and inclusive to remote audiences. The product grows organically for us which speaks for itself ; the business at sites we could not equip with our initial investments requests it. We have made the choice of Zoom rooms 5 years ago and it is still one our our star products supporting frictionless collaboration.

• schedule YouTube videos and playlists
• Use Chrome Sign Builder to display menus. For example, to show menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, create 3 schedules. Each schedule has its own menu URL to display the menu content.
• create a presentation using Google Slides and display it using Chrome Sign Builder.
• When you publish the presentation, set it to start as soon as it loads and restart again after the last slide.

Incentivized

• Zoom Rooms is built on the Zoom platform so faculty already know it and use it.
• All touch panels regardless of manufacturer have the same look and feel.
• Easy to schedule, easy to use.
• Supports a wide range of hardware from several vendors.

• Despite its name I found it easier to create my actual signage elsewhere, then use Sign Builder for scheduling
• Does require a base level of technical know-how - not as approachable as other tools may be
• As device count grows, management may become a bit cumbersome

Incentivized

• Support is prompt, but not always the most immediately knowledgable or helpful.
• Admin portal is convoluted. There's gotta be a better way to assign scheduling permisissions.
• Zoom account managers are constantly being reassigned. It is nearly impossible to keep track of who presently is our account manager. When we were going through the process of looking into Zoom Phone, our manager was literally switched twice, resulting in us working with three total managers during that two-month process.

Incentivized

User friendliness (experience very similar to the already familiar Zoom app), consistency of the UX across locations and manufacturers. Screen sharing is made super easy (proximity). Zoom rooms support strategic needs for Hybrid work and reduced travels. Backend admin interface is simple (that's good) and provides useful dashboards for trend analysis.

Chrome Sign Builder is pretty much a learn on your own and support yourself option. There is precious little by way of assistance offered by Google for the product, and responses to reports of bugs and even updates are painfully slow in coming if they come at all. If you are an IT guru, this may be ok. If you are not prepared to fend for yourself, then keep looking.

Incentivized

We selected sign builder because of its ability to work across platforms and the promise of dynamic updates so that members and guests would have access to up-to-date information. Unfortunately, Chrome Sign Builder is a low priority at Google, suffers from reliability issues, requires significant user investment in learning the system, and failed to meet our needs. We have gone back to paper calendars and synching issues while we evaluate other products. A bit of time spent on research on the front end would have saved us considerable effort and time. In a volunteer organization, our only cost was goodwill among members while we tried the system.

Incentivized

I personally think Zoom Rooms is superior to Teams. I have setup 3 or 4 Zooms Rooms for my organisation and it is pretty straightforward to do without any formal training or education on Zoom Rooms. My experience with Teams was the opposite. A horrible interface and options deliberately hidden away in menus levels deep. On top of which, Zoom Room outperforms Teams Rooms in both video and audio. On the desktop, Teams is a bloated app whereas, in my experience, Zoom Rooms works well.

Incentivized

• Has saved huge amounts of time updating the display TV in the front office
• With a simple add-on designed to sync Twitter posts with Google Slides, it means that the TV now updates live with tweets on the school page
• It is free and only costs the price of a cheap Chromebook device which is plugged permanently into the TV

Incentivized

• Great value for money as used it more than planned after installation.
• Finding the use of screen share and whiteboards is becoming very popular and meant we wanted a larger screen for this. ;-)